There's nothing a good Republican of the teabagger sort hates more than activist judges. I mean, geez, just look up "activist" in their dictionaries and you see liberal judges making all sorts of heavy-hammered decisions based on, on, well, on stuff they don't agree with. Privacy. Civil rights. That kind of thing.
And yet can anyone think of a more "activist" (i.e., twisting the Constitution like a pretzel to achieve a pre-conceived result) ruling than the conclusion that "corporations are people" and that "money is speech?" Scalia and Thomas like to refer to themselves as "originalists." So where in the First Amendment does the original text equate money with speech? What money is, is money. What's speech, is speech. (In fact, reading the quite spare First Amendment, our founding patriarchs went out of their way to mention separately freedom of speech and freedom of the press. One might conclude, therefore, that freedom of forming words with one's mouth, and freedom of newspapers to write what they want, is what's protected. Writing, not talking, by individuals? Not mentioned by name. Maybe, since I'm not in any way a member of "the press" this blog isn't protected at all. Now there's originalism!)
Well, of course it's reasonable to extrapolate and claim that the founders were okay with private citizens writing stuff, although it's hard to prove they had cyberspace in mind. But to equate money with speech? That can only be seen as a ruling out of thin air, designed to give political advantage to the most wealthy and powerful. No one can call that anything but judicial activism of the highest order.
Likewise, the creation of corporate personhood is an undeniable example of judges making law; the very thing that conservatives have, until melanosis overtook the country, considered anathema.
Politics is nothing if not a breeding-swamp of hypocrisy. If all sides do it, and they do, the last five years of Republicanism have taken it to heretofore unseen levels. Line 'em up and count the transgressions, stick 'em on a seesaw and watch which end sinks.
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